Tuesday, November 29, 2016

The College Point Window On This Election

One Coastal Small Town vs. Red State Mania

There have been wild demographic shifts in the United
States over the last seven decades. Some, perhaps many, Americans have shown
little or no discomfort over those changes and have moved on with the times; other
Americans, perhaps many of them, have dug in their angry heels and now wish to
unwind as many of those changes as possible. This election drew a bold line between
the two groups.

Once upon a time, I was a boy. The time was the early
1950s; the place was New York City, the Borough of Queens, neighborhood of
College Point. Most people, even most New Yorkers, would need a bit of
clarification as to the College Point part. Let’s say that it is a part of the
greater Flushing area, being north of Flushing proper, on and extending into
the East River, on the north shore of Long Island, between La Guardia Airport
(across the Flushing River) and the Whitestone Bridge.

College Point does make kind of a “point” of land, but
neither the East River nor the Flushing River are real rivers. The East River is
actually an estuary of considerable size, and the Flushing River is more or
less an inlet about a mile long and culminating in a swamp. So from the
geography on up, College Point is ridiculous.

The Whitestone Bridge is actually a bridge. It’s very
beautiful. You can Google it.

That long-ago world was what I sometimes call “the
white New York.” The city in general was something like 84% white. College
Point, when I was a boy, was more like 99% white. That was back when the white
folk were firmly in charge, the time for which many white people have grown
nostalgic more recently. That College Point was almost entirely white was like
an unwritten rule, and it was enforced with considerable prejudice by regular
people without prompting from political or religious entities.

Did I say 99%? Let’s see. We were told that there were
about 30,000 people in College Point back then. The 2010 census gave it as
24,500. Who knows? Maybe it’s been somewhere in that range for this entire
time. The demographics, however, are radically different now than they were
then.

Back then, to my knowledge, there were two black people
who actually lived in College Point. They were a couple in their fifties; they
worked the night shift at, I was informed, Flushing Hospital. I remember the
building that they lived in, and I saw them coming and going from time to time.
Sometimes getting the bus to go to work at about 5:30 p.m.; sometimes returning
home in the early morning. If you saw them in the morning, they’d be carrying
grocery bags from the Blue Star Market over in Flushing. Why, you’d think that
they were consciously avoiding shopping in College Point, or even being seen on
the street! Which was, I’m sure, the case, as ashamed as I am to admit it.

My tailor had an assistant who was a very kindhearted
black man, and I know that there were other black workers at various businesses
and factories. After hours they returned to their residences somewhere else.

That was the white world, which, as we shall see in a
moment, has passed from history’s stage, never to return.

As for Hispanics in College Point, I did know that the
mothers of a couple of my friends were Puerto Rican woman who had married local
men. There were no Puerto Rican families, though. I didn’t think much about it.
By the early 1970s the nice park in College Point had been discovered by Puerto
Ricans from Flushing and Corona. They’d come over on Sunday and hang out on
blankets, kick around a soccer ball. That made for a bit of tension, but none
of them had moved in as yet.

No minorities successfully moved into College Point
until after I had graduated from high school. There were stories of a few close
calls, but people were scared off. Threats were made.

Of Asians, I only knew of two families. There was the
Filipino family of my friend Alan A. In those days, and since, Filipinos are
much more likely to be greeted as part of the American family than any other
Asians. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe people remember that we fought the
Japanese together. I guess there’s more to it, though, because we fought the
Japanese together with the Chinese, too. Anyway, Alan’s was only one family.
The other Asian family was Chinese, and, in an amazing burst of seeming racism,
they owned the, wait for it! The Chinese Laundry. They were very nice and they
seemed prosperous. I took my father’s shirts there.

Homosexuals are not, of course, a demographic, but
let’s address that issue here as well. If there were any homosexuals at all,
men or women, we would have had no way of knowing it. Back in the pre-Stonewall
era, homosexuals kept their heads so far down it’s amazing that they could see
a curb without tripping over it. And there were good reasons for that,
too. It was open season on homosexuals all
year, every year, back then. A guy could get hurt.

Politically, everyone in New York City was a Democrat.
Before the mid-1970s, Republicans couldn’t get arrested in New York. When John
Lindsey got elected mayor in 1965 or so, he ran on both the Republican and the
Liberal Party tickets. He was elected on the Liberal ticket. We were
blue-collar, yellow-dog Democrats, with many of the working people being in
unions.

Longing for a return to this world is like that short
story, “The Monkey’s Paw.” The moral of that story, and all other “three
wishes” stories, is, “be careful what you wish for.” Those longings always cause enormous grief;
those stories never end well.

New York, the Modern Era.

Everything has changed by now in such a comprehensive
way that it really is a challenge to the understanding, even for people who,
like me, embrace diversity.

Here are the stat’s for College Point from that 2010
census:

White: 32%

Asian: 28%

Hispanic: 36%

Black: 3%

By now it seems like New York also tolerates
Republicans much better than in the past, while still voting largely
Democratic. Hillary won New York, including College Point.

I have no statistics regarding the gay population, and
my guess is that the actual numbers would remain about the same as a percentage
of the population. That seems to be the way homosexuality works; it occurs
naturally in the human population, and I’ve never seen or heard any speculation
as to whether the percentage swings very widely, or at all. I would venture to
guess, however, that the gay population is a bit more comfortable these days
with identifying as gay. Certain demographics notwithstanding, most of the
American people do seem to have grasped the fact that when one considers
“homosexuals,” one is considering one’s own beloved family members, friends and
co-workers, sports stars, dedicated police and firemen, doctors and nurses, soldiers
and sailors, etc. For most people it was a small matter of discovering just who
all of those gay people were. Having found out that they knew and loved
multiple gay people, most Americans, to their credit, raised their eyebrows and
said, “oh!” And that was more or less that.

But this is New York that we’re looking at in detail
here. New York is a nice place, in many ways, but it is not America.

I have many friends from College Point that I am still
in contact with. Quite a few still live there; the rest are spread out all over
the east coast from Florida to Upstate New York, and all points west. Many of
the friends who still live in College Point seem to resent the new diversity,
and many of those who moved, moved because of it. Even though the area still
went Democratic this time, this resentment bodes ill for the future of our
politics.

The coastal people of America, including New York,
voted for Hillary this time around, with a push, no doubt, from their diverse
elements. Other reasons might include the fact that the white coastals are
often better educated, more disposed to believe the evidence in scientific
matters, less likely to take stories from iron age texts as facts, more able to
resist shouted lies and flattery meant to influence their votes, and better
able to think for themselves.

As for the diverse elements of the coastal states, the
immigrants, minorities, subscribers to novel sexual theories, and others, I
believe that all such groups have it rather harder in American society than we,
the plain vanilla, and as a result there is a much greater flowering of common
sense among them. They live more firmly in the world of reality, and are forced
to look at things with greater attention. So Hillary, in this case, was a
no-brainer for them. They know mischief when they see it.

The So-Called Fly-Over States

Middle America is a different story. Many of those
states out there in what New Yorkers would call the middle of nowhere were
almost all white back in the Fifties, and they’re still almost all white now.
Those folks were fairly prosperous back then, and the white people like them
were in charge all over the country. By now, those jobs and that prosperity are
gone, and the coastal regions and the areas around big cities like Chicago seem
to be chuck full of diversity. In fact, we’ve had a black president with an
African name! How diverse is that! Maybe, the thinking goes, way too diverse.

Is there a certain tension between the fact that those urban
and coastal regions have more diversity and the fact that they have more
prosperity as well? Well, there might be at that. That could make people
resentful. Maybe all of that diversity stole our prosperity!

Something happened in this election. I’m tempted to say
that back in the white America of my childhood, or the World War II Era, let’s
say, New Yorkers and Montanans, or Arkansans, etc., were racists or xenophobes
in more or less the same measure. They would tolerate homosexuals to a very
similar degree, each to the other (even if that was close to zero percent).
They were Republicans or Democrats in approximately equal measure. They could
talk together and get along, at least if the New Yorkers made an effort to
speak slowly. (That’s not a dig, by the way; that shit is true.)

The bad news is that the two groups were all kind of
racist and xenophobic back then, and they all hated homosexuals, but the point
is that they had not yet learned to hate each other. That is the gift of the
Modern World, the Modern America. Mutual contempt and hatred even within the
white tribe is a recent development.

The worst news is that these “heartlanders” appear only
to have gotten more racist and more xenophobic and more fundamentalist and more
intolerant of other American demographics than they were in the past. This has
happened over the last thirty years as they have watched their prosperity go up
in steam. They have further hardened their hearts against those traditionally
hated groups, and they have added many types of Americans to their hate lists. All
of this while the coasts loosened up a bit.

They hate immigrants; minorities; homosexuals; the ungodly;
Liberals; cosmopolitans; the poor (even though many of them are themselves
poor); Muslims; culturally tolerant urban whites; Catholics and mainstream
Protestants; the educated; anyone receiving government assistance (even though
they themselves are very likely to be receiving government assistance); the
Washington (and other) elites; Jews; and Democrats in general. They hate the
courts; the Federal Government; science; diversity; and education. That is a
breathtaking hate list.

Regarding the world, they do seem to tolerate Australia
pretty well, and they appear to view Canada with mere suspicion and bemusement,
while rejecting the rest of the countries of the world out of hand as either
ungodly, socialist, communist, libertine, Muslim, brutish, or some combination
of the above.

Now here’s the bit that I’ve been leaving out of all of
my commentary until this point: they are empowered to hate all of these things
by reference to their particular brand of the Christian faith.

It’s all about the Bible. Science has no validity at
all. Many people in this situation believe that the earth itself has only been
here for a very limited amount of time. Evolution is some kind of demonic trap
for the faithful. White people were created in God’s image; all people of color
are not purely white due to some curse directed at them by God. It’s a circus
of anti-intellectual conformity out there out there in the plains states, and
down south as well. No one in many of these areas is listening to the adults
anymore.

These people, these Christian Reconstructionist, white
supremacist yokels, are willfully ignorant, anti-intellectual and woefully
uninformed. To simply call them “low-information,” or “low-education,” leaves
off their most clearly defining characteristic. They are FUNDAMENTALIST
Christians. Their minds are closed to debate. They know it all, as it has been
shown to them in their revealed literature, and as it has been explained to
them by their ministers, their mega-church pastors, their right-wing political
echo chamber, and by a long roster of media celebrities from Alex Jones of the
Info Wars to Shawn Hannity and Bill O’Reilly of Fox News.

And Here We Are.

For one thing, real discussion and compromise is
impossible under these circumstances. Finding a solution to our current,
growing problem is going to be very difficult without the ability to discuss
differences of opinion or find compromises that are acceptable to all sides.

For another thing, unwinding history is impossible.
Those jobs are gone; they’re never coming back. The discussion, if such a thing
were possible, would be about new types of jobs, new industries, and better
distribution of wealth. (Yeah, I said it. And within the last year alone I’ve
read a few thoughtful pieces by ultra-rich tech guys or venture capital guys
admitting that if nothing is done through the system, they’ll be hanging from
lamp-posts before long.)

And there’s this, none of those minorities, or
immigrants, or members of other sub-cultures that you don’t like, they’re not
going anywhere. Most, by far, are American citizens. It might be possible to
deport some of the undocumented, but that effort would elicit such screams of
anguish from the business community that it would be shut down quickly. It
might be possible to pull some Green Cards and get rid of a few students or
something. We’re married to the rest. Get used to it.

And two things about religion: 1) Keep it to yourself,
people. Keep your religion where it belongs, in your head, and in your church;
keep it between you and your God; and 2) When it comes to OUR country, keep
YOUR religion out of it. Make sensible reality based decisions about your
votes, and don’t try to use YOUR right to vote to take OUR rights away. Or else
we’ll start to wonder why you’re allowed to vote at all.

In the future, fundamentalist religiosity will be seen
as a disabling mental condition. Do not hasten the day.

So now we are about to swear in Donald J. Trump as
President of the United States. Reading it like that always looks like
something in a movie script.

You could add: unless something happens. There’ll be no
discussion of the possibilities here. I’ll wait until after the facts are in and
then let the professionals discuss whatever has happened at that time.

No discussion of possible vote tampering, either. The
strong tendency in America is always to avoid any discussion that could lead to
a loss of faith in the system. So when it does happen, like in the year 2000,
it turns quickly into “move along, people; nothing to see here.” We’ll see if
anything develops this year.

It would be simplistic of me to blame the entire thing
on the snake-handling Rubes. They couldn’t have done it all by themselves,
although they were, no doubt, a big part of the victory. The Rubes got a lot of
help. There are a great many yellow-dog Republicans these days; they’ll vote
for anyone at all who appears on the Republican ticket. Many people have a big
difference of opinion with Ms. Clinton’s policies and her style of politics;
many people are opposed to globalization and Neo-Liberalism in all of their
manifestations. Many people believed all of the lies that they read every day
about Ms. Clinton. Many men, and women, just don’t think that the presidency is
a suitable job for a woman. Many people just don’t like the woman.

Beyond the question of the results among the people who
actually voted, there is the problem of the half of registered voters who
didn’t bother to vote. Hillary’s negatives are so high that I’m afraid many of
these stayed away rather than soil their hands voting for either candidate.
It’s also important that all of the polls, right up to the morning of the
election, had Hillary winning by a comfortable margin. This allowed
unenthusiastic Hillary voters to just let her win without their having to go to
the trouble of voting.

Let’s be serious. Voter turnout in America is always on
the low side. It’s almost like many people just don’t care who wins, or who
governs them. They’re all the same; the policies come from somewhere else
anyway; why bother? That sounds very cynical, but it might be uncomfortably
close to the truth.

That might be true in a normal election year, anyway.

2017: the year that normal was thrown straight out the
window.

Now we will, unfortunately, see what will happen. Only
one thing is for sure: it will all be described as “fantastic!”

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About Me

Mr. C is: a reformed lawyer; a religious atheist; a useful "Handy Man;" an amateur social scientist; a beloved teacher; a well liked husband and father; Ambassador Emeritus from, and to, Planet X; a freelance professor; taxi driver to the stars (Joe DiMaggio and Ronald McDonald, both out of uniform); an excellent fire fighter; an enthusiastic but untalented musician; an experienced counselor; a top-notch disk jockey; an all around get-along-guy; a cunning linguist; a would-be lifestyle victim; a Masonic wannabe; a frequent reader; Professor Irwin Corey's Ph.D. adviser; an accomplished driver and motorcyclist; a famous rockologist; a reliable but indifferent bullshit detective; a poor speller; a proud United States Navy veteran (honorably discharged, barely); the Ayatollah of Ass-o-Hola; a drug legend; a Returned Peace Corps volunteer (Thailand); a generally charming man; nationally and internationally known from coast to coast; a legend in his own mind; a cultural-anthropological critic-at-large; an avenging angel who coolly bides his time; Soul Brother number 37; and a friend to the poor.